The Hierarchy of Hustling

Making more money is on everyone’s mind. As it should be. Finding ways to pull in more cash is one of the fastest ways to hit your money goals. The question that is rarely answered is how should I allocate my time to make that a reality? To help with that question, I present the Hierarchy of Hustling.

We are going the opposite of Maslow, the higher we go the less time they get. Beware The Death Trap, when something wastes more time than it’s worth it falls off and starts on fire.

The Hierarchy of Hustling

The Base – The 9 to 5 Grind

Surprised? I thought you wanted to escape the 9 to 5, but here you are telling me this is where I should spend the bulk of my Hustle?

Yes, Absolutely.

Let’s break why this 9 to 5 thing is so important

By default, you are required to show up for at least 40 hours per week

It represents the biggest chunk of your income

The income is steady and stable

High opportunity for salary growth, that compounds over time (I love percentage raises)

Health Insurance alone is nothing to bat an eye at. The 401K tax benefits save us thousands every year on top of the free money match. Our income progression has been our single biggest money win over the last 7 years and it hasn’t slowed down. If you are going to dedicate 40+ hours/week you might as well hustle your ass to make more.

On top of all that:

It allows you to build a nest egg and pay your bills while you work on the next level

Focussing on the corporate career could be considered conservative, but with a family, a mortgage, a dog, and a slew of other financial responsibilities it is a must for us. If you are ok with the risk, feel free to chuck your 9 to 5 into the wind and move onto the Passion Project (I just don’t recommend it 🙂 ).

Side Hustle – The Passion Project

Before I talk passion projects, I want to talk My side hustling philosophy:

I’m not interested in doing something that pays me far less than I earn at my day job. I would rather work on something that has the ability to pay off bigger later that I also enjoy doing.

Which leads to my passion project, working on Apathy Ends. The pay is poor right now but I believe in the long-term opportunities working on this site will unlock.

The Passion Project should be something that can shift to the base when you have proven out you can make it work. It’s something you enjoy doing. Hopefully, it is something you are creating, or a skill that allows you to create (coding for example).

It is also hard to break into, you can’t just crack open a new URL or business and start raking in the cash. If it were that easy everyone would do it.

I look at this as something that has the ability to pay off big or be a form of passive income in the future. That is just my opinion, and is likely driven by the fact that I want to leave full-time work earlier than most. Making a ton of money isn’t a necessity, it could be your new “job” after you have enough money to ditch the 9 to 5.

Just make sure you love it.

Side Hustle – The Convenient Cash Grab

This falls into the “day to day dollars” bucket, you aren’t going to make a killing but if you have some smaller savings goals or want to pay for a vacation this is a good spot to start.

The good thing is they don’t require a ton of skill or knowledge to start out and the money is decent. If you can download an app, drive a car or walk and hold a leash you are in business.

I call this The Convenient Cash Grab because you can pick up some work when you free time or are simply driving in a direction you think someone else wants to go. Personally, I don’t spend a lot of time here because the aforementioned “Free time” is rare and eaten up by my full-time job and my Passion Project.

*If any of those sound good to you – my buddy Kevin from Financial Panther is a side hustling pro and has the info you need.

Side Hustle – The Death Trap

Let me introduce you to The Death Trap of time vs money: Paid Online Surveys

If I had a nickel for every “survey sign up” pitch I get bombarded with on social media or my inbox, I would have more than you can actually make filling out these surveys for 100 straight hours.

I tried them, I hated them, and they are a colossal waste of a valuable resource, your time. Seriously, I filled out about 5 “pre-surveys” that took 5-15 minutes and paid me some “points” then never got invited to do the actual survey where I could earn slightly more points.

There are only a few people winning and they aren’t answering a hundred questions on a scale of 1 to please murder me. They are conning you into signing up.

Open the nostrils and take that big stinky pile of side hustle in. Puke.

I watched the MLM cycle play out first hand growing up. A new one is created, someone gets “rich” they sign up some other people below them. Then there are parties thrown where everyone comes over and drinks the kool-aid (literally and figuratively, because there was a punch bowl).

I don’t even know how many products a certain member of my family tried to shill, but I do know that riches were never found and the extra inventory bought to hit minimum spends was given away as Christmas presents for years to come.

Instead of pursuing The Death Trap, focus your time anywhere on the actual pyramid. Even if you fail your knowledge will be more valuable than what you make down here.

What do you think of my Hierarchy of Hustle? Do you agree that the 9 to 5 should outweigh the Passion Project?

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Reader Interactions

Comments

In general I agree with you that a 9-5 is the safest and best place to spend the majority of your time. As you mentioned, it’s where most people will make the majority of their income, and the benefits can be really significant. I’ve been self employed for 10 years and the health insurance costs alone are almost enough to make me want to get a job.

When I was working to get away from my job I was spending about 30 hours per week, sometimes more, on my business and 40 hours per week at my full-time job. I didn’t want to leave the stability of a job before my business was ready.

I think the 9-5 is safest and does work out the best for the majority of people. In my case, looking back, I probably would have been better off if I had left my job a little sooner. The time I’ve invested into my own business has been far more valuable than what I was getting from an employer. But there’s a risk, obviously.

I like your strategy of waiting for the business to be ready, it has got to be pretty hard to pull away from a steady full-time job but kudos to you for doing it (and building something that can replace it).

Health insurance is going to be a big barrier for us no matter what we do long term unfortunately.

That’s pretty good. I think this hierarchy fits really well for younger folks with a lot of potentials. If you have room to grow in your full-time job, then you should put a lot of time and energy into it. However, if your day job isn’t working out, then the picture would change. Then, the passion project and the cash grab become more important. It really depends where you are in life.

It all depends on your situation I suspect. 9-5 grind should be the focus when you have growth opportunities but as Joe pointed out that changes over time. Passion projects come high when your financial position is stable but sometimes you just need cash flow. Even surveys probably apply to some situations, at least I know the cash back portion of some of those can.

I think the holy grail for many people is for the 9-5 and passion project to converge — i.e., you get paid a reliable income, enough to afford benefits or it comes with paid benefits, and it fits what you are genuinely interested in. While you aim for that, one approach is to do these in parallel as in your hierarchy. Where it gets very difficult is when you have any other commitments in the mix (spouse, kids, aging parent, fitness, etc). So whether parallel or stacked, a separate 9-5 and passion project is too time-consuming for many. I opted for a portfolio career that includes some of all of these elements. I have a business made up of projects that have a 9-5 quality (steady cash, repeat business), projects that are particularly passion driven (and these can change as interests change), and the cash grab when there is a cash flow need that requires a focus on money at that moment. This takes a lot of juggling but I feel like it gives me the best of all worlds. Still, my kids are older…when they were younger, I had a flextime 9-5 and one passion project at a time, and it was exhausting!

I agree with you on the death traps. Man, there are so many people banging the MLM drum for a long time to never make any money. I add content mill writing to the death traps. For what content mills pay and the time involved in writing, a person is better off on a street corner with a sign begging for cash.

I’m about to leave the safety (or prison?) of the 9-5 grind to travel and re-evaluate what I want to do. It’s quite scary to reject a guaranteed pay check each month – and I’m far away from developing any passion project money.

I’ll probably go for the convenient cash grab first (in the UK we have Matched Betting, which seems like an easy way to make fast money), and see what passion projects I can develop along the way.

I’ll try to avoid the death-traps! I guess Swagbucks and the like fall into that category?

I’ve given myself a year, by which time I might have circled back to the 9-5 grind 🙂

I have a weird perspective on this one, since I’m quitting my 9-to-5 to do my passion project in 32 days. 😉

If there’s a time when your Passion Project becomes profitable and viable as a business, you’d be crazy not to seize the opportunity. I think this is important for people like me who have never felt fulfilled or happy at their full time grind working for someone else.

Ooooh this is a very creative (and true!) way of thinking about it. A passive side hustle and side hustles you enjoy are the best ways to make money. Paid surveys are a time killer with very little potential upside (I know because I was there!)

The one area where I feel like I fall down as a person pursuing FIRE is that I don’t have a passion project. It seems like everyone is pursuing growing something they’re passionate about into a viable replacement for their full-time job. My passions are all things that bring in no income. Travel (I have no interest in blogging about it), volunteering, camping, biking with my kids, just being outside… I have no way to turn these into things that make money. At least not without sucking away what I enjoy so much about them.

So I focus on my full-time job and the occasion cash grab if it’s not too much hassle. I want to enjoy my free time when I’m young and healthy. I don’t get the push for endless side gigs to make more money to accelerate FIRE. I want to enjoy my life right now! It also means I won’t reach FIRE until my mid-50s, but I’m OK with that trade-off.

On the survey thing, I made a couple hundred bucks on them a decade or so ago. I’ve tried them again more recently and found I never qualified for anything. Probably because I don’t buy anything anymore! To me, any of those low $/hr things are only worth it if you’re doing them while watching TV or some other mindless entertainment.

MLM’s drive me nuts. I would love to look at the finances of my friends who do them and point out how they’re making nothing or so little that it’s likely not worth their time.

Once upon a time a mail order outfit magazine some gadget or another. They did not make a profit selling the gadget. Their purpose was to collect names on a mailing list that they did sell at a tidy profit. Likewise, King Gillette famously made a fortune giving away razor handles so that he could sell the blades.

IF I were to engage in MLM, it would be for a similar non-direct goal. Probably the MLM involvement won’t make me enough money to justify the time, but can it yield the training/expertise in sales and managing a sales organization that WILL justify the time/effort? I don’t know either way, but the thought occurred and put it out there for your consideration.

I was thinking of Mrs. Picky Pincher as an example of a passion project becoming full-time work as I read this. I’m glad she commented. But I think it’s rare to turn your passion into something lucrative without spending an enormous amount of time on it.

Like Nate, MLMs drive me nuts but mostly because those who participate act like they’re members of a secret cult.

The secretive part was when they invited you to a gathering about this “great thing” or “wonderful opportunity” but wouldn’t say what it was about unless you went. If you guessed “Oh you must be selling Amway” they’d act shocked that you even heard of it.

As a cradle Baptist I was exposed to a number of far-too-earnest believers, and that same earnestness was in this Shaklee lady’s voice. In my case it wasn’t the secretiveness, but the borderline insane fanaticism.

I’ve never really thought about it this way with 9-5 as the main hustle. Then you use your free time on fun things that can be rewarding like your blog (which I’ve been following for some time now.) So what you mean to say is, focus on being better at your strengths 1 and 2 and those, as Peter Drucker states, will benefit you with the most output. Interesting. Thanks!

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